The latest edition of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication is live, and contains an outstanding special section on “social network sites” edited by danah boyd and Nicole Ellison.  I’ve not had a chance to read all the articles, yet, but I can say with certainty that danah boyd and Nicole Ellison’s “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship” is definitely going to be one of those oft-cited and even more often read papers in university courses!  Here’s the announcement from danah’s blog:

JCMC Special Theme Issue on “Social Network Sites”
Guest Editors: danah boyd and Nicole Ellison
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/

[X] “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship” by danah boyd and Nicole Ellison
[X]“Signals in Social Supernets” by Judith Donath
[X]“Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances” by Hugo Liu
[X]“Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites” by Eszter Hargittai
[X]“Cying for Me, Cying for Us: Relational Dialectics in a Korean Social Network Site” by Kyung-Hee Kim and Haejin Yun
[X]“Public Discourse, Community Concerns, and Civic Engagement: Exploring Black Social Networking Traditions on BlackPlanet.com” by Dara Byrne
[X]“Mobile Social Networks and Social Practice: A Case Study of Dodgeball” by Lee Humphreys
[X]“Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube” by Patricia Lange

While not getting quite as much blog attention, it’s also worth noting that there are a number of other great papers in this issue of JCMC, too.  In particular, I found these two very engaging:

[X] The Creative Commons and Copyright Protection in the Digital Era: Uses of Creative Commons Licenses by Minjeong Kim; and
[X] Every Blog Has Its Day: Politically Interested Internet Users’ Perceptions of Blog Credibility by Thomas J. Johnson, Barbara K. Kaye, Shannon L. Bichard, and W. Joann Wong